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Friday, 31 January 2014

4Q Interview with Marc Poirier - aka Joseph Edgar.

Marc Poirier is an exceptional Acadian musician that
performs as Joseph Edgar. Former
front man for Zero Celsius, his solo career is soaring with five albums to his
credit; the most previous release is a single titled Alor Voila which appears on his newest album- Gazebo - released this month.
Originally from Moncton, NB he now resides and performs in Montreal, Quebec.
His music has taken him throughout North America as well as Europe. See below
for his website.

4Q: I’ve been enjoying your singing for many years Marc and
am following you as Joseph Edgar. Tell us how you come to choose Joseph Edgar
as your performing name, what it means to you

JE: The story is actually quite simple. My full name is Marc
Joseph Edgar Poirier. Edgar is my paternal grandfather’s name, and Joseph was
the tag given to almost all male babies born Catholic at the time. When I came
to choose which moniker I would go by for my solo adventure, I simply chose
that. Before that time, as a member of Zero Celsius and other artistic
adventures, I would just use the name Marc Poirier. However, as there are so
many Marc Poiriers in Acadie, including a Radio-Canada journalist, I thought it
better to use something else. Don’t know if I would choose the same name today,
but four albums later, and another one coming just around the corner, I guess I
should stick to that!

4Q: In August of 2013, you were able to reunite with
your former band members in Moncton.
It was a fantastic show. Share that experience with us.

JE: That was as overwhelming as anything I could have
imagined. We had no idea so many people would show up! The organizers told us
they were expecting 5000 people. We told ourselves that if 1000 to 2000 people
showed up we would be extremely happy. To finally hear the roar of a crowd of
ten thousand people just blew all of us away! Topping thatwas the fact that we were playing next to the
Petitcodiac River, a much maligned river for which he had been quite outspoken
when we were a working band back in the 90s.
However, for me, the most important highlight came from hanging out with the
gang, fifteen years later. We rehearsed for a week, day and night. Well,
nighttimes were mostly focused on laughter, but we did get a few hours of
constructive work done. It was quite fascinating to see and feel how no matter
how much time had elapsed between our last show and this one, that synergy,
that bond we had had not disappeared. It’s important to note that we never
officially broke up. Our paths just took different directions, and that was
felt deeply between us. Of course we talked about a few regrets, but bitterness
between us was nonexistent.

4Q: Share a fond or amusing childhood memory with us.

JE: I watched Jaws when I was way too young. It was going to
run on TV and all my older cousins had talked about how great a movie it was.
Finally, I thought, I was going to be able to watch it. However, my parents had
different plans and said no. I raised hell, convinced my life would not be
complete if I did not watch it. Finally my parents, exhausted, succumbed to my
crazed hysteria and let me absorb the masterpiece. They were right. I was too
young.In the summer, we would spend all
our time at our cottage on Shediac Bay, and thus, spent a lot of time in the
water. It took quite awhile for me to feel at ease again swimming in the sea. I
tried to hide my fear as best I could, but a few times my cousins would sneak
up on me in the water, laughing wildly as my girlish shriek would scare all the
seagulls away. My terror lasted the whole summer. There has never been a shark
sightingin Shediac Bay.

4Q: A new album is coming out in January, GAZEBO. Tell us about the making and
inspiration for that album. (At this reading Gazebo was successfully launched in Montreal on January 28)

JE: That album came as a surprise as I had said to myself
that 2013 would be a year where I would lay back and just work for the year.
Then, out of the blue, I was approached by a record label who wanted to put out
a sort of compilation of my previous four albums. I thought that the idea was
interesting, if not just for the sake of signing with this label. My previous
records were all released independently, with very little distribution. This
seemed like an interesting opportunity. They did ask if I had a few new songs
to add to the compilation. I had written many songs in the previous moths, but
all in English. They said that they liked them, but would like at least one new
French song. The following day I bought a new electric guitar and four weeks
later had written roughly twenty new songs in a continuous writing ritual that
would see me in the middle of the park, next to a gazebo, every morning around
8 am, scribbling notes and thinking of melodies. I would then go to my little
set-up in my basement and would scratch out and record the embryo of a new
song. As the label heard all these new songs, they opted to not put out a
compilation, asked who I wanted to work with as a producer, and the rest, as
they say, is part of my little history. We went to a studio next to a lake in the
Laurentians where the producer had a cottage. We set ourselves up there, and
intermittently, over the course of the next four months, banged out what would
become my next album. Out of the twenty songs, we finally decided to go the
short and sweet way, and finally stuck to ten. Sometimes you have to trim the
fat.

Thank you Marc, for sharing your thoughts with us here at
4Q. Good luck with all your future projects. Visit Marc’s website at www.josephedgar.ca.

Next week, Friday Feb/7, Detective Jo Naylor is back. She and her partner, Adam Thorne, search for the man that almost killed her.

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